What Business Owners Want

Cloud Accounting Weekly is now Own Your Close, a newsletter for management accountants, controllers, and providers of outsourced accounting services. For more accounting technology updates, tune in to the Cloud Accounting Podcast.

At first, I figured it would be a nice vacation with a little work tossed in, but I ended up also taking home a valuable nugget of insight that I’d like to share with you now.

It has to do with what business owners are looking for when choosing who to bank with. According to research provided by Bill.com, the top two criteria are:

Ease of use

Cost

This isn’t surprising in itself. Who doesn’t want to buy a product that’s both easy to use and affordable?

These two criteria probably apply to just about every business-to-business service or product in existence.

And yet accountants spend very little time optimizing their firms for customer experience or lower fees.

(In fact, most of the time we’re doing our best to figure out ways to charge even more for our existing services).

We accountants like to think that our expertise means we don’t have to be the easiest to work with. We’re busy people in high demand — that’s why we don’t return your calls or emails right away. And our expertise justifies our obscene hourly rates.

But if you ask me, knowing what you’re doing is just table stakes. You need to be an expert to play the game. And most clients don’t know how to spot the difference between one expert and another, anyway.

So how do you differentiate yourself once you’ve got a seat at the table?

Make your firm ridiculously easy to work with, and do it for a great price.

The right tech stack will let you do that. Use apps like Bill.com to drive down the cost of low value transactional work while providing a superior customer experience.

The best part is that you don’t even have to add new services. Just do what you’ve been doing, but do it better and cheaper.

Everybody wins.

Except for those firms that don’t make the switch — they’ll be hemorrhaging clients!

As always, here’s my curated collection of the best links I clicked on this past week.

The prospect of blockchain technology remaking financial services just moved a step closer to reality after banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. completed a successful six-month test in the $2.8 trillion equity swaps market.

Payment Schedules — Getting multiple and partial payments on an Invoice is now easier with Payment Schedules. Create a plan of when each payment is due without having to create multiple Invoices or continually editing an existing Invoice.

"Cloud Accounting Weekly" is now "Own Your Close," a newsletter for industry accountants, controllers, and providers of outsourced accounting services! Subscribe and stay up-to-date with the latest in technology, new regulations, and management tips.

For additional resources for management accountants, visit https://floqast.com/resources/. FloQast (where I work) is close management software built by accountants for accountants to help them close faster and more accurately.